we are planing to have a Linux Install Party at our university in some months. We will offer various distributions to install, and we are currently thinking about including Gentoo on the list. We are currently thinking about what to do to make it possible to do that, and not have everybody spend 30 hours with compiling. What we have thought about so far is:

Create a local mirror of the portage tree and all packages most likely downloaded

Build a distcc farm for everybody to use out of the ~40 running Linux machines in our PC Pool.

Probably use some binary packages for the most compile-time heavy apps (X, kde, openoffice)

Any comments or suggestions on how we could improve handling of Gentoo at our Linux Install Party?

This is a neat idea. I've been thinking of doing a Free Software install party at some point, but it will definitely be a while before that happens! I figure Free Software will allow a greater audience (including Windows and Mac users, for whom FIrefox and Openoffice.org might be interesting), as well as Free-/NetBSD to be installed. LIinux would of course be the centerpoint of the event though

About some tips, I agree that you should make some "stage4" tarballs, but you probably don't need to make them too generic. If you have a few days before the party, get a pentium3 or 4, athlon, amd64, and ppc machine and compile with optimizations for those arch's. Generally speaking, that should be enough for most users. Just make sure to use genkernel for the kernel (or compile most options as modules and enable module autoloading and emerge hotplug) so that the kernel works on all the attendee's different systems. For other apps after the basic install from your "stage4" tarball, the render farm sounds great (but realize that not all builds will allow multiple instances of make running while building the app). You may want to install xorg-x11 by default, but I don't know about WM/DE's as people are so split on that option.

Also, it's probably a good idea to be prepared to google for monitor specs so that you can setup X-org correctly and quickly on the new installs! About other system specs, most manufacturers have a list for their systems, and most people will probably come with pre-built systems from Compaq/Dell/Hewlett Packard/etc... so the info shouldn't be too hard to find if hardware autodetection fails for some reason.

Please let us know how this goes, and post any tips you might have for others who are thinking of doing the same thing. Especially useful would be things that you now wish you had done differently, had you only known _________________Lila themes | The Porthole Portage Frontend | SVG-Utils